Snaring the Nuclear Sun: Decolonial Ecologies in Titaua Peu’s Mutismes: E ‘Ore te Vāvā

Abstract

A specter is haunting French Polynesia—the specter of nuclear colonialism. Communities affected by nuclear colonialism have reported feeling shame regarding their radiation-induced diseases and having difficulties putting their radiation-induced trauma into words. Yet these mental health issues have often been eclipsed in the public sphere by other urgent struggles, such as individuals’ personal fights with cancer and communities’ political fight for reparations. This article analyzes the mutism that has long surrounded nuclear colonialism in French Polynesia by focusing on the literature that has helped to break, weaponize, or otherwise transform silences. Titaua Peu’s debut novel, Mutismes: E ‘Ore te Vāvā, was one of the first novels to explore the difficulty of narrating nuclear colonialism. As such, it offers critical insights into one of postcolonial studies’ central questions, famously posed by Gayatri Spivak in 1988: in a (neo)colonial context, “can the subaltern speak?” In her novel, Peu situates Spivak’s inquiry in the context of the Anthropocene, reframing it in an ecocritical perspective. Can the victim of nuclear colonialism describe this indescribable violence? If she does speak, can she prevent her discourse from being reappropriated? And if she refuses to speak, what does her silence convey? Peu’s novel opens new decolonial ecologies in which not only speech but also silence become political weapons against environmental racism. Her book is a timeless reminder of Mā‘ohi literature’s potential to empower victims of nuclear colonialism.

Et tous ces essais portent un nom, ils ont été baptisés. Pourtant je pensais que l’horreur n’avait pas de nom, je me trompais, c’est la douleur qui n’en porte pas. Je pleure 720 Hiroshima en mon si beau pays.

(And all these nuclear tests have a name, they have been christened. I thought that horror was nameless, I was wrong, it is suffering that cannot be named. I cry 720 Hiroshimas in my beautiful land.)¹

—Stéphanie Ariirau-Richard, Tristesse s’agrippe à moi, 720 fois Hiroshima en mon pays”

It is 2 July 2019, and Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia, is in upheaval. On this day fifty-three years ago, France exploded its first atmospheric nuclear bomb in the Pacific. Commemorating this tragic anniversary, thousands of people have gathered in the public square in front of the statue of Pouvanaa a Oopa, father of the country’s movement for national sovereignty. Interspersed in the crowd stand large black caskets, one for each archipelago, with white numbers painted on them. Together, these represent the number of victims of the Pacific Experimentation Center who have died as a result of France’s nuclear colonialism.

Popularized in the 1990s by antinuclear activists, the expression “nuclear colonialism” designates contemporary dynamics of colonial exploitation, in which imperial countries militarily occupy and irreversibly pollute the lands and natural resources of communities, far away from their own economic and political centers, in order to further the development of their nuclear technologies. Between 1966 and 1996, France detonated 193 nuclear and thermonuclear bombs in the islands of Moruroa and Fangataufa. Nuclear colonialism in French Polynesia constitutes an extreme form of colonial aggression, which will impact Mā‘ohi people and environments long into the future (cescen 2006, 20, 279). But its effects go beyond environmental and health issues. In nuclear colonies, everyday life is shaped by dependence on nuclear money. This nuclearization of the economy subtends a widespread sense that local peoples have either made a devil’s bargain or had it forced on them—a debate that continues to inform local politics long after the last of the tests. Nuclear testing functions as what French sociologist Marcel Mauss has called a “total social fact”: a phenomenon that has economic, legal, political, religious, artistic, and psychological implications (Mauss 1923).

On this fifty-third anniversary of French nuclear colonialism in the Pacific, amid the protesters, there is a woman wearing a dark placard around her neck that reads, among other slogans: “Atteinte d’une leucémie depuis 6 ans” (Suffering from leukemia for 6 years). Her name is Hina. She is the daughter of Tahiti’s famous pro-independence lawyer, Stanley Cross. She was diagnosed with leukemia at twenty-four years old. But it is only six years later, on this commemorative day, that she is talking about it for the first time. “Je tremble un peu” (I am shaking a little bit), she tells the crowd of protestors,

parce que pour moi, ce n’est pas facile de l’avouer au grand jour. Je ne sais pas pourquoi mais j’ai honte, alors qu’on ne devrait pas, et c’est pour ça qu’aujourd’hui je suis là devant vous. . . . Je suis là pour vous, pour qu’on se lève.

(because it is not easy for me to admit my disease in broad daylight. I don’t know why, but I am ashamed. Yet we should not be ashamed. This is why I am here today, in front of you. . . . I am here for you, so that we rise up.)

(Association 193 2019f)

In her inspiring speech, Hina retraces the challenges of her disease, from the painful medical procedures she underwent to her constant fear that her son will also suffer from a radiation-induced disease. But in addition to raising awareness about health issues under nuclear colonialism, she alludes to another issue brought by the Pacific Experimentation Center: the self-silencing or mutism that has struck its victims. She explains, “Pendant 6 ans, j’ai été muette, je n’ai pas parlé, je me suis cachée. . . . Il y a plein de malades comme moi qui n’osent pas se lever, et je suis là pour les représenter, moi qui peux marcher, qui peux parler devant vous” (For six years, I was mute. I did not speak. I hid. . . . And there are many sick people, like me, who do not dare to stand up, and I am here to represent them, I who can walk, who can speak in front of you) (Association 193 2019).

Guilt, shame, and silence are still contemporary issues in communities affected by nuclear colonialism. This is a common problem, raised long ago by antinuclear activists. As reported by Peter de Vries and Han Seur, who conducted the first independent study of Polynesians’ experiences of the nuclear tests, guilt plagued the Polynesian workers employed in Moruroa and Fangataufa. Their active participation at the Pacific Experimentation Center has often made them, “in their own eyes, responsible with regard to the possible consequences their actions had for their own health, that of their families and their offspring” (de Vries and Seur 1997, 66). But guilt has also burdened victims who have never set foot in the nuclear atolls. Women in particular have been affected by guilt and mutism surrounding radiation-induced diseases. As explained by spoken word artist Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, in another nuclear colonial context, Marshal-lese women who gave birth to unviable fetuses after involuntary exposure to radiation often hid their suffering from their peers. They “buried their nightmares beneath a coconut tree, pretended it never happened . . . sickened by the feeling of horror that perhaps there was something wrong with them” (Jetn̄il-Kijiner 2017). Like a radiation-induced mental health problem, guilt and shame are often passed on from generation to generation. Yet these issues have often been eclipsed, in antinuclear circles, by other urgent struggles: individuals’ personal fights with radiation-induced cancers and communities’ political fight for reparations.

Trauma studies suggests that victims of violence are often hesitant, or even reluctant, to weaponize their wounds (Leys 2007; Denham 2008). This may be because victimhood is often (wrongly) associated with passivity, and “the unappealing attribute of passivity cleverly disqualifies victimization from consideration” (Chappell 2000, 211). Yet victimhood can also be empowering. This is why it remains crucial for victims of nuclear colonialism to break—or politicize—their silence. In this article, I analyze the role of silence in antinuclear resistance. I focus in particular on a work of literature that has helped to break, weaponize, or otherwise transform this silence, the novel Mutismes: E ‘Ore te Vāvā, published in 2003 by Tahitian novelist Titaua Peu.

I read Mutismes: E ‘Ore te Vāvā by mobilizing questions and concepts developed in the field of environmental humanities. The founding scholars of what was first called “ecocriticism” defined their discipline as the exploration of the relationship between literature and the environment, conducted in a spirit of commitment to sustainability (Buell 1995; Glotfelty 1996). This critical framework is particularly relevant in Pacific studies. Analyzing place as a critical category, alongside race, class, and gender, helps to point out that there is no representation of the Pacific outside of language and that new antinuclear metaphors have played a crucial role in buttressing the antinuclear movement in Oceania.

Some scholars in environmental humanities argue that the world discursively shifted in 1952. When Americans exploded the first thermonuclear bomb in the Marshall Islands, representations of the environment shifted from emphasizing the climatic stability characteristic of the Holocene to underscoring the human-driven climatic instability of the Anthropocene (Lutts 1985; Worster 1994, 342; DeLoughrey 2014, 10). Nuclear colonialism may be the political structure of the Anthropocene par excellence. Inspired by decolonial ecocritics such as Ramachandra Guha (1989), Rob Nixon (2011), and Elizabeth DeLoughrey (2014), this article analyzes decolonial ecologies in Peu’s novel in order to clarify the global implications of the silence surrounding unhealed nuclear wounds in Oceania. In particular, Peu’s novel offers a remarkable opportunity to use an ecocritical perspective to reframe one of postcolonial studies’ central questions: Gayatri Spivak’s famous inquiry, “Can the subaltern speak?”

Spivak argued that the subalterns, whom she defined as the most marginalized and exploited people, are only heard when expressing themselves through imported conceptual paradigms—at which point they cease to be subalterns and become spokespeople, implicitly complicit in harvesting knowledge as third-world raw material for consumption in elite circles (Spivak 2010). Peu’s work invites readers to reexplore Spivak’s inquiry in the context of the Anthropocene. Can the victims of nuclear colonialism describe this indescribable violence? If they do speak, may we ask for whom? And if they refuse to speak, what does their silence convey? Exploring those three questions, I argue that Peu’s debut novel opens new lines of inquiry within the field of decolonial ecology, revealing that resistance may take the form of not only increased visibility but also withheld speech.

Snaring the Nuclear Sun: How to Describe the Indescribable?

Peu’s debut novel is written in French, but its title is bilingual. Mutismes is the French plural noun for “mutism,” but on the novel’s cover, it reads as mut-tis-mes, with orthographical play and without a capital letter, and the final “s” appears to be falling off. By contrast, e ‘ore te vāvā means “no more continuing muteness” in Tahitian. This cover, designed by Peu’s publishers, Denise Koening and Robert Koening, may be a way to highlight the contrast between the French part of the title, thus mutilated, and its Tahitian counterpart, which respects all editorial rules.² Despite this apparent care in crafting the title and cover, the novel is often simply referred to as Mutismes, without the subtitle—betraying from the outset a silencing, curtailing, or misreading of Indigenous narratives.

This novel was met with great public enthusiasm and was reprinted three times in the year following its publication. Tackling the silence surrounding both domestic violence and nuclear violence under the Pacific Experimentation Center, Mutismes: E ‘Ore te Vāvā was the first novel to denounce the double oppression faced by Mā‘ohi women in a patriarchal and colonial society. A scathing denunciation of life in Tahiti under nuclear colonialism, it has been credited with foreshadowing the political revolution of 2004, which put the Tavini pro-independence party in power after three decades of uninterrupted pro-French government. Political activist Tea Hirshon, close collaborator of the Tavini, was enthralled by Peu’s style after discovering her book. She quickly offered her a job in the Tavini administration, giving her a platform to develop her ideas. Peu has since written numerous essays in Littérama‘ohi (Peu 2003b, 2005), and in 2016 she published a second novel, Pina, which was awarded the Prix Eugene Dabit du Roman Populiste and was shortlisted for the Grand Prix du Roman Métis—two prestigious French literary prizes.

In this study on silence, I focus on her debut novel, Mutismes: E ‘Ore te Vāvā, published seven years after the end of French nuclear testing and eight years after the largest and most violent antinuclear protests to shake the country. Peu published it at a time when, as she puts it, it seemed “étonnant . . . qu’un Tahitien prenne la plume. Que celle-ci devienne lance, flèche. Étonnant car, après tout, c’est un peuple pacifique et toujours endormi, n’est-ce pas?” (surprising . . . that a Tahitian would take a pen. Transform it into a spear, an arrow. Surprising because, after all, Tahitians are a peaceful Pacific people and permanently asleep, right?) (Peu 2003a, 30). Her book instantly became a political sensation, not only because of its antinuclear stance but also because of her own background:

[Les Autonomistes] étaient bien contents avant la sortie de Mutismes, parce qu’ils pouvaient dire qu’il n’y avait que les demis qui écrivaient sur leurs volontés et leurs aspirations. Mais quand Mutismes est sorti, ce qui a choqué, c’est que je m’appelle Peu, pas Spitz ou Brotherson. Une fille sans prétention, pas issue des grandes familles. Dans ce pays, on est marqué par le pouvoir colonial, mais aussi celui des grandes familles. Et les grandes familles sont marquées par la lubie de l’autochtone qui a voulu se marier avec le colon. Moi, je ne suis pas demie, je ne venais pas de la caste. On ne pouvait pas dénigrer mon livre en disant que je n’avais écrit ça que parce que j’étais rebelle.

([Autonomists] were happy before Mut-tism-mes came out, because they could say that only the Demis [upper-class mixed-race people] were writing about their desires and their aspirations. When Mut-tism-mes got published, people were shocked because my last name is Peu, not Spitz or Brotherson [see Spitz 1991, Brotherson 2007]. I was a modest girl; I did not come from the great families. In this country, we are under colonial domination, but we are also under the domination of the great families. And the great families come from some Indigenous people’s obsession to marry the colonizer. I am not Demi, I did not come from the elite. Claiming that I had only written my book to rebel against my own caste could not dismiss it.)

(pers comm, 10 Aug 2016)

Peu was one of the first writers to offer a dystopian representation of Tahiti’s urban slums under nuclear colonialism. Her narrator is an anonymous Mā‘ohi heroine raised in La Mission, a run-down neighborhood of Papeete’s inner valleys. The narrator’s early years are plagued with domestic abuse, poverty, and oppressive puritanism. In high school, the heroine falls in love with Rori, a pro-independence activist twenty years her senior. Her mother, opposed to this relationship, sends her to a boarding school on Raiatea, another island some two hundred kilometers (about 124 miles) away. It is during this exile that the heroine develops cultural pride and political awareness, and when she is serendipitously reunited with Rori, who has come to Raiatea to give a political speech, they elope and return to Tahiti together. They are living in Papeete when they learn that France has decided to resume nuclear tests after a two-year temporary interruption. This historical event, which took place in 1995 under President Jacques Chirac’s conservative government, provoked widespread mobilizations against France’s nuclear program across the Pacific. However, despite this international outcry, France refused to negotiate with the Mā‘ohi protestors in Tahiti. Retracing the ensuing historic protest as Mā‘ohi activists turned against each other, the novel becomes a tragedy.

A powerful indictment against nuclear colonialism, Mutismes: E ‘Ore te Vāvā explores the strengths and the silences of antinuclear discourse in French Polynesia. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, it does not describe the nuclear explosions themselves. Describing these events constitutes one of the main representational challenges of Pacific antinuclear literature: how to describe energy levels that can only be compared to that of the sun; how to convey the scale of a threat that could last hundreds of thousands of years given the long half-lives of the radioactive elements involved (cescen 2006, 279); how to narrate the violence of a bomb that destroys lives thousands of miles away from its launching site, decades after its explosion; or, in the words of writer Chantal Spitz, “comment expliquer l’inexplicable?” (how to explain the inexplicable?) (Spitz 1991, 113). To this day, only two Tahitian novelists, Chantal Spitz and Rai Chaze, have described a nuclear explosion in a work of fiction. They did so in their debut works (Chaze 1990; Spitz 1991), before switching to more diffuse representations of nuclear morbidity in the rest of their oeuvre (Maurer 2018). Yet, this consensual silence surrounding the nuclear devices themselves is, in fact, also political.

In Mutismes: E ‘Ore te Vāvā, the narrator eschews mentioning the nuclear tests for the first hundred pages of the novel. When she eventually evokes nuclear explosions in the final pages, she alludes to the impending nuclear tests through a surprisingly oblique set of metaphors:

Ça n’allait pas être grand-chose, huit essais tout au plus. . . . J’ai revu ces images de champignons qui explosaient la nuit, le jour. Effroyables. Des champignons élancés, longilignes ou plus petits et plus larges. Des trucs qui s’élevaient, en tout cas, et autour, il me semblait que c’était le vide. Ces photographies étaient posées là, dans ma maison, comme autant de plaies qui avaient réduit mon pays au silence.

(It was not going to be a big deal, eight tests at most. . . . Those images of mushrooms exploding day and night came back to me. Dreadful. Willowy, slender, or shorter and larger. Anyway, stuff rising up, with what seemed to me like a void all around it. Those pictures were displayed there, in my house, like so many wounds that had reduced my country to silence.)

(Peu 2003a, 127)

The bombs are described indirectly, through euphemisms (“the tests”), indirect speech (“It was not going to be a big deal”), dead metaphors (using the stereotypical image of a “mushroom” to refer to the nuclear clouds), and circumvolutions (“stuff rising up”). The narrator avoids directly describing the bombs’ horrors, their blasts, and the agony of their victims. In particular, she avoids resorting to the most common metaphor used to describe nuclear bombs and does not compare them to the sun. As DeLoughrey has shown, “in American Cold War propaganda, these weapons of mass destruction were naturalized by likening them to harnessing the power of the sun, and their radioactive by-products were depicted as no less dangerous than our daily sunshine” (2011, 236). Peu’s text, by its silent refusal to use the sun as metaphor, undermines military “nukespeak.” Her bombs are both silent and still, immobilized in photographs. Granted, most Tahitian women only had access to images of atomic bombs: they were seldom employed in Moruroa and Fangataufa, unlike the numerous Tahitian men—one fourth of the country’s labor force (cescen 2006, 133)—who were employed at testing facilities and thus witnessed the explosions directly. Yet in Mutismes: E ‘Ore te Vāvā, this historical fact takes on a symbolic dimension as the silence of the photographs parallels the silence to which the country has been reduced.

While the narrator does not describe the nuclear explosions themselves, she symbolically transfers nuclear violence into descriptions of everyday life. To give a precise example of this narrative strategy, I return to an early scene in the novel. When the heroine meets Rori, her antinuclear lover, he is preoccupied with the mysterious circumstances surrounding the collapse of two buildings in a social housing project, which resulted in dozens of deaths. As he investigates the case further, he discovers that the accident was not due to a mudslide, as the media proclaimed, but rather to the anti-independence local government, which had orchestrated the destruction of the houses to clear space for a mall. While this digression does not play a crucial role in the narrative, beyond denouncing the corporate greed of pro-French politicians, its literary role is more significant than it appears at first glance. Peu describes the event in the following terms:

Cette nuit-là, à vingt-deux heures, on avait entendu un grand bruit. Un terrible fracas, comme celui d’un tonnerre inattendu, grondant avec toute l’énergie contenue dans l’univers, assourdissant, pesant et qui semblait ne pas vouloir s’atténuer.

Le bruit . . . et l’odeur de la mort . . . Irréversible.

La nuit avait été déchirée, en un seul coup. Rien ne serait plus comme avant.

(That night, at ten o’clock, a crashing sound had been heard. A terrifying rumbling, resembling the noise of unexpected thunder, roaring with all the energy contained in the universe, deafening, oppressing, and seemingly unwilling to ever stop.

The noise . . . and the smell of death . . . irreversible.

The night had been torn up, all of a sudden. Nothing would ever be the same.)

(Peu 2003a, 57)

In this scene, nuclear explosions take place on a metanarrative level, as a metaphor to describe smaller-scale, shorter-term violence. After the temporal introduction recalling the chronological precision of missile launching, the narrator describes the explosion in terms reminiscent of hydrogen bombs (“grondant avec toute l’énergie contenue dans l’univers” [roaring with all the energy contained in the universe]). The catastrophe is described as “irreversible,” yielding destructiveness on the time frame of radioactive contamination (“Rien ne serait plus comme avant” [nothing would ever be the same]). Even the length of the sentence, juxtaposing five consecutive syntactic units, contrasts with the narrator’s usual concise style, which suggests the altogether different temporality of this form of violence. The narrator continues with a similar extended metaphor:

Un nuage de poussière avait recouvert le quartier tout entier. Ça puait la mort, la fin du monde. . . . Cette nuit-là, pour beaucoup, l’apocalypse des Evangiles si souvent étudiés était arrivée.

Il avait fallu trois semaines pour que les corps aient été tous retrouvés. Calcinés, broyés. Pas même le souvenir que la vie ait existé auparavant.

(A cloud of dust had settled over the entire neighborhood. It stank of death, of the end of the world. . . . That night, many people thought that the apocalypse of the Gospels so often studied had come to pass.

It took three weeks to recover all the bodies. Carbonized, crushed. Not even the memory that life had existed before.)

(Peu 2003a, 57)

The evocation of a “nuage de poussière” (cloud of dust) simultaneously suggests the characteristic mushroom cloud and the radioactive ash that covered entire archipelagoes after particularly violent thermonuclear explosions. Conjuring up the end of the world and the apocalypse, the narrator’s metaphors evoke dystopian nuclear imagery. The entire scene is described as a nuclear annihilation, as there is “pas même le souvenir que la vie ait existé auparavant” (not even the memory that life had existed before).

On the following page, the latent nuclear referent is further developed at the expense of verisimilitude. The narrator specifies that “the media from the entire world” gathered on the small island, commenting on the sufferings of the people of the neighborhood who were “mostly from the Tuamotu” (Les médias du monde entier s’étaient donné rendez-vous dans ce petit quartier de Tahiti [dont] . . . les habitants . . . [étaient] pour la plu-part originaires des Tuamotu) (Peu 2003a, 58). This unlikely international media coverage of a mudslide destroying two houses in the southern hemisphere in fact appears to be referencing the media coverage of some of the explosions in Moruroa and in Bikini—at times veritable press operations organized by Paris and Washington dc (Davis 2015, 61; Danielsson and Danielsson 1993, 288). The fact that most of the victims are from the Tuamotu Archipelago is a last instantiation of the running nuclear metaphor, since Paumotu people are among the most impacted by nuclear fallout from Moruroa. This poetic suspension of the reader’s belief encourages the symbolic interpretation of this passage.

By choosing to describe a mudslide like a nuclear explosion, Peu implicitly suggests that classic representational techniques cannot adequately portray the environmental threat posed by nuclear colonization. Instead, she strategically links antinuclear struggle and the fight for housing rights. By scaling down representations of nuclear violence to a more human level and using nuclear disaster as a metaphor rather than a referent, Peu invents a reachable, comprehensible ecopolitical language. Reenacting Maui’s exploits in the atomic age, she snares the nuclear sun, forcing it to slow down, scale down to a domestic level compatible with the realm of human comprehension.

When presented with this interpretation of her work, Peu acknowledged the presence of this running metaphor throughout her book but highlighted that she had written it without having the Pacific Experimentation Center in mind. For her, Moruroa itself is a metaphor: “Je ne parle pas de Moruroa,” she says, “je n’y suis jamais allée. . . . Si mon écriture a ce style, cela illustre plus l’explosion de la pseudo-rencontre, le choc de deux civilisations. . . . La bombe, c’est l’image même du colonialisme” (I don’t talk about Moruroa, I’ve never been there. . . . If my writing has this style, it illustrates rather the explosion of a pseudo-encountering, the clash between two civilizations. . . . The bomb is the very image of colonialism) (pers comm, 10 Aug 2016). This “image” of colonialism thus appears to have permeated and suffused her writing as a structuring metaphor, without necessarily translating into descriptions of actual bombs in the plot itself.

Her refusal to represent nuclear bombs directly can therefore be read as a politicized silence. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, nuclear bombs had become a commodified, de-dramatized image. As analyzed by film scholar Jennifer Fay, decades of nuclear testing had turned the bombs into mundane, scheduled, and predictable events. Art and literature greatly contributed to this de-dramatization. Citing the commodification of nuclear imagery, notably in the US military’s early nuclear films and Andy Warhol’s nuclear lithographs, Fay argued that “the tests and their films thematized and anesthetized as nontraumatic the repetition of controlled catastrophe” (2018, 68). Peu’s silence, by contrast, castrates this commodified nuclear imagery. By choosing to describe nuclear bombs only obliquely, Peu suggests that nuclear violence is pervasive and omnipresent, yet unpredictable and menacing. In other words, her oblique description maintains the bomb’s ominous aura, which has ceased to be conveyed by conventional description of a nuclear explosion. When silence is more politicized than the most explicit images, mutism becomes a powerful strategy of resistance.

From “Who Can Speak?” to “Who Will Listen?”

Pacific people have been singing, talking, and writing about nuclear colonialism ever since the explosion of the first atomic bomb over Japan in 1945 (Mayer and others 2006), but they have seldom had the authority to control the diffusion of this discourse. As shown by poets and scholars such as Carol Farbotko (2010), Craig Santos Perez (2017), and Elizabeth DeLoughrey (2019), Pacific antinuclear discourse has long been appropriated, in particular by foreign nongovernmental organizations, to serve diverging agendas. This has raised the issue of the translatability of local antinuclear movements. Foreign antinuclear advocates can exploit Pacific nuclear suffering, marketing the antinuclear thrust of their struggle, yet neglect its anticolonial aspect. While local activists can speak, who actually listens to their demands for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific?

In this case, the issue is not that Pacific antinuclear movements lack visibility, since the movement for a Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific is the world’s fourth largest Indigenous network (Kulethz 2002, 132). Rather, the issue is that this antinuclear discourse has too often been misinterpreted, distorted, and appropriated by foreign nongovernmental organizations, such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, who have focused on its antinuclear side at the expense of its decolonial agenda (Smith 1997, 32–33). Echoing Myrl Beam (2018), I refer to these massive transnational nongovernmental organizations’ silencing of local antinuclear movements as the green nonprofit industrial complex—or Green Inc. Paradoxically, Green Inc’s agenda can reproduce the destructive imperial dynamics it purports to denounce. Massive philanthropic organizations function not only as charitable enterprises but also as tax shelters and can become “like a bloated shark that must keep swimming in order to stay alive: if it stops feeding itself with more causes that funnel more money into it, it will die, and it exists in order to keep existing” (Nair 2019). Despite the diversity of ongoing discussions within environmentalist circles worldwide, there is a dominant, deeply worrying trend among massive nonprofits to find marketable causes to sustain what has effectively become hierarchical, transnational, and profit-accumulating corporations.

Many green nonprofits have historically preyed on Indigenous cultures as marketable commodities to be displayed for fundraising alongside images of charismatic megafauna. To put it in the words of Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez, Indigenous people are “the new polar bears” (2017). These nongovernmental organizations tend to endow Indigenous cultures with an innate and systematic native ecological wisdom—a process that Mita Banerjee has called “the myth of the EcoNative” (2012, 215). Since the slow violence of nuclear contamination does not constitute a marketable narrative (Nixon 2011), antinuclear nongovernmental organizations in particular have often exploited the image of Indigenous populations in nuclear colonies. By contrast, Pacific activists can provide a marketable embodiment of such scientific abstraction (Conklin and Graham 1995, 164).

Such appropriation may have happened with the active consent—the agency—of many local antinuclear activists. As de Vries and Seur highlighted, Indigenous activists often need nongovernmental organizations, who have the resources to diffuse their cause on a global scale (1997, 164). Yet the simplistic image of helpless Indigenous populations living in harmony with nature, while helpful to sensitize distant audiences to the issue of nuclear contamination, does not explicitly challenge nuclear colonialism. In fact, it depoliticizes the antinuclear struggle. The heralding of native cultures as ontologically environmental by Westerners becomes problematic when Indigenous struggles are perceived as resulting from instinctiveness, inertia, and conservatism rather than from concern for the future and interest in alternative modes of development. As several scholars have pointed out, in much ecocritical writing, environmentalism is described as instinctive for Indigenous communities but as a matter of choice for the white ecocritic (DeLoughrey 2007, 197; Banerjee 2012; Whyte 2017).

This is one of the reasons why the association between Green Inc’s employees and local decolonial activists has always been fragile at its best. In French Polynesia, for example, Greenpeace immediately distanced itself from the local antinuclear movement as soon as local opposition turned into violent embodied protest. The green corporation justified its behavior by citing its commitment to avoid “political issues”—which meant, in practice, refusing to support independence (de Vries and Seur 1997, 165). Such stances have led many Pacific activists, such as political scholar Haunani-Kay Trask, to denounce the impossible collaboration between white, middle-class environmentalists, and Indigenous, often-disenfranchised activists. Pointing out that these two socioeconomic classes often pursue different long-term agendas, Trask argued that “coalitions between natives and non-natives must be temporary and issue-oriented” (1993, 255). However, this assertion is likely nuanced, as Trask herself notes that long-time native activists know the few Westerners who are the exception to this rule (1993, 251). In Tahiti for example, non-natives such as Bruno Barrillot and Antoine W Du Prel have successfully and productively dedicated their lives to the antinuclear and decolonial struggle, alongside Mā‘ohi activists like Jacky Bryant, John Taroanui Doom, and Roland Oldham. Beyond the ethnic categories she resorted to, Trask spotlighted important power dynamics that exist between the two groups, affecting their relationship. She seems to be using an ethnic vocabulary to refer to general sociopolitical categories rather than to a form of cultural determinism. And it is undeniable that there is a sociopolitical tension between foreign activists tied to massive antinuclear nongovernmental organizations and local activists invested in a not only nuclear-free but also in a Pacific that is not only nuclear-free but also independent.

Peu’s work offers the possibility of a critical intervention in this debate to shed light on these different power dynamics that split antinuclear movements. The heroine’s political radicalization is initially grounded in her desire for social justice, not ecological concerns. During the first hundred pages of the novel, she only evokes the tests peripherally, mentioning in passing a relative working in Moruroa and Rori’s opposition to the nuclear tests (Peu 2003a, 19, 47). Yet by the end of the novel, when she puts her body on the line during the most violent political protest in modern Tahitian history, her struggle is clearly informed by environmental concerns. The narrator thus depicts her political mobilization as a call from the land, which is tellingly anthropomorphized: “Ma terre vibrait, elle nous appelait” (My land vibrated, she was calling us) (Peu 2003a, 128). What started as her anticolonial awakening has turned into an ecological stance. In fact, her vocabulary makes the fight for political freedom and for ecological rights so interlinked that her characters are accused of merging ecology and independence: “A la radio, on nous reprochait de faire l’amalgame entre écologie et indépendance, mais pour nous, les choses paraissaient claires. Un Tahitien qui reprend sa terre est un Tahitien libre, et, pour la reprendre, il nous fallait empêcher qu’elle soit de nouveau bafouée, souillée” (On the radio, we were accused of amalgamating ecology and independence, but for us, things seemed clear. A Tahitian retaking his land is a free Tahitian, and, in order to retake it, we had to prevent it from being yet again offended, defiled) (Peu 2003a, 137). Her language refuses the demarcation between ecology and politics, as the heroine uses the lexical field of environmentalism to talk about politics. She describes self-determination in environmentally committed terms as the act of “reprend[re] sa terre” (retaking one’s land). Yet she also uses the lexical field of politics to talk about environmentalism: she personifies the landscape, describing the contaminated land as an anthropomorphic entity “bafouée, souillée” (offended, defiled). This rhetorical strategy links ecology and politics in the very grammatical structure of the text.

Since environmental problems are linked to our sociopolitical modes of production, placing nature-oriented politics and people-oriented politics, biocentrism and anthropocentrism, and ecology and social policy in opposition is generally counterproductive (Guha 1989, 74). Consequently, the environmentalism described in Mutismes: E ‘Ore te Vāvā is not precisely a fight for the “environment.” Rather, the protagonists fight for themselves, to define who should have access to the environment and who should benefit from it. Clearly, Peu’s novel suggests that Mā‘ohi people, who have preserved their ocean and developed sustainable lifestyles on their islands for centuries, are better positioned to claim its usufruct than Westerners who have only used it as nuclear dumping grounds and touristic playgrounds for the world’s privileged.

This is where the novel introduces tension between local and foreign antinuclear movements. As the narrator highlights, mainstream media opposes nuclear tests solely from an ecological perspective:

Il s’en trouvait des “non,” pour la nature, tout simplement. . . . On vit les puissants du Pacifique se battre au nom d’une région, d’un océan et de terres à préserver. Pas une fois, je n’entendis parler de mon peuple. Pas une fois, je n’entendis parler de mon pays. . . . On expliqua, au sein de l’onu, au sein du Parlement européen les souffrances que causait le nucléaire. On oublia de parler de ceux qui portaient ces blessures. Plus rien ne nous appartenait.

(Many were saying “no,” simply for nature’s sake. . . . We saw those in power in the Pacific fight in the name of a region, of an ocean, and of lands to preserve. Not once did I hear them mention my people. Not once did I hear them talk about my country. . . . They explained nuclear-induced sufferings at the United Nations, at the European Parliament. They forgot to talk about those bearing these wounds. Nothing belonged to us anymore.)

(Peu 2003a, 129)

Non-native environmentalism is presented here as an imperial ideology, robbing Mā‘ohi people of their land a second time. Foreign ecologists have represented Mā‘ohi Nui without the Mā‘ohi—as a biosphere to preserve rather than a country to decolonize. The use of impersonal phrases and the French third-person pronoun on, roughly equivalent to the English neutral pronoun “they,” dissociates the land and its rightful owners (“On oublia de parler de ceux qui portaient ces blessures” [They forgot to talk about those bearing these wounds]).

As the novel progresses toward direct confrontation between Mā‘ohi activists and colonial forces, the activists’ struggle diverges from the objectives of the green nonprofit industrial complex and explicitly becomes a domestic issue: “Au moment même où les choses semblaient s’aggraver, les stars de l’écologie, celles qui avaient fait des milliers de kilomètres pour dire non aux essais, au même moment, elles avaient toutes disparues. Plus aucun soutien, plus aucun défilé, la main dans la main . . . Je les imaginais, à ‘Bora,’ sirotant des cocktails hors de prix” (Right when things seemed to get worse, those stars of environmentalism, who had traveled thousands of kilometers to protest nuclear tests, all instantly disappeared. No more support, no more protesting hand-in-hand . . . I imagined them, in “Bora,” sipping overpriced cocktails) (Peu 2003a, 137). Here, it becomes apparent that the values motivating the stars of green corporations and those motivating local antinuclear activists are fundamentally incompatible. Ironically, rather than abandoning the struggle and going back to their own countries, the foreign ecologists portrayed here are assumed to be basking in the very nuclear wastelands they were once supposedly defending. The green corporations’ preservationist ideology thus seems aimed at preserving islands so they can serve as playgrounds for the rich. “Sipping overpriced cocktails in ‘Bora,’” these foreign ecologists become the stereo typical caricature of a globalized monocultural elite, superficially concerned with environmental issues that profoundly affect Indigenous societies. Reducing Bora Bora to its marketable nickname, “Bora,” they strip it of its cultural specificity and turn it into a globally consumable commodity. Paradoxically, this puts them in the footsteps of the French military they were supposed to oppose. Indeed, the military speaks the same language as that of the “stars of environmentalism,” as their official nickname for Moruroa was a similar distortion into two syllables: “Muru.”

By resorting to these rhetorical choices, Peu echoes famous Pacific scholar Teresia Teaiwa, who criticized French designer Louis Reard’s decision to commodify local place-names such as Bikini and to offer them for consumption in what she called the “militouristic” industry (1994, 1999). Similarly, Peu denounces green nonprofit elites’ efforts to ensure the smooth running of the tourist industry, which, in turn, serves to hide the militarism behind it. It is striking to see that, several years after Teai-wa’s and Peu’s publications, most popa‘ā (white foreigners) still refer to the two-piece bathing suit as a “bikini” and to the former American military base as “Bora.” Clearly, the message has not been heard.

Peu’s work resonates well beyond French Polynesia. It is therefore important to decompartmentalize the francophone Pacific by clarifying the vast and ongoing coconstitution of nuclear violence and discursive violence on the regional scale in all of Oceania. In anticolonial Pacific literature, the land, genealogically related to its people, is always already politicized. “Environmentalism” is only one (introduced) way to describe this relationship. The question is not whether this literature speaks about it but rather whether these voices are listened to. Subsuming antinuclear political movements under the label of environmentalism, like some green nonprofits do, paradoxically silences the very people it purports to support.

Mutism or E ‘Ore te Vāvā?

Peu’s work has often been interpreted in contemporary scholarship as a denunciation of the Tahitian people’s alleged inability to speak in the face of colonialism and cultural genocide. Mutismes: E ‘Ore te Vāvā has been described as a novel that illustrates colonial mutism through the “impoverished” angle of the “simple colonial and social denunciation” and as a story in which the inability to speak “alienates individuals and generates domestic violence” (Poulin 2013, 301; Vigier 2012, 206). Many literary critics have identified an inability to speak as a recurring theme in Pacific speech in general. “The weight of silence” in Pacific society (Vigier 2012, 206), the “silence of the country” in Polynesia (Ogès 2016, 73), and the “diffuse mutism” of former orators (Fenoglio 2004, 18) are all alleged characteristics of a “silent people” (Baré 1987, 30), who supposedly have been left muted by the weakening of oral traditions. Admittedly, many critics nuance these generalizing statements by heralding some Pacific writers—such as Peu herself—as inspiring counterexamples to their people’s deafening silence (eg, Porcher-Wiart 2010, 151; Frengs 2017, 154; Ramsay 2014, 209). While these studies saliently identify a complex relationship with silence in Pacific communities, they are too quick to frame this silence as a lack. The (ongoing) colonial project has indeed involved the deliberate and violent silencing of Pacific Islanders’ voices (Speedy 2016), but these critiques have gone too far. Silence is better understood as both a symptom of nuclear colonialism and a strategy for Indigenous resistance.

Peu herself has noticed this trend to focus on a single interpretation of mutism, regretting that her writing has been analyzed in scholarly publications as “une écriture du cri” (literally, “shout writing,” or loudly committed literature). She condemns this as an unfounded accusation of her inability to speak, as if she could not write, and only shout her rightful anger (pers comm, 10 Aug 2016). Mutismes: E ‘Ore te Vāvā points to many new ways of understanding the discursive powers of silence.

It is true that in the novel the narrator imputes her people’s tragedy to their inability to find the appropriate words to articulate their struggle. The novel closes with the historical scene of the 1995 antinuclear protests. From the moment the barricades are set up, speeches come to an end both literally and narratively. Foreign public speakers disappear, the protagonists fall silent, and the narrator switches to monosyllabic, nominal sentences. Activists and protestors, unable to reach the pro-French governmental representatives, turn against each other. They set the city on fire. Friends wound each other. Rori kills a protestor. The last pages of the novel lament language’s inability to describe the ensuing violence (Peu 2003a, 144–146):

“Papeete, à feu, à sang.” (Papeete in flames, in blood.)

“Ravages, rages et impuissances, les rêves et les mots qui s’effondrent.” (Ravages, rage and powerlessness, dreams and words collapse.)

“Après tout, que pouvions-nous bien dire? Pitié? Malheur? Des mots si fades, si dérisoires . . .” (After all, what could we say? Pity? Calamity? Such bland, derisory words . . .)

“Nous avions atteint le seuil de l’innommable.” (We had reached the threshold of the unnamable.)

“Mutismes. Là-bas, les mots sont morts.” (Mutisms. Words died over there.)

Nominal sentences, unanswered questions, word omissions: this is a symbolic scene evoking the battle for speech, the battle for visibility. Yet Peu’s focus on discursive failure is not meant to accuse the 1995 protestors, much less “Tahitians” in general. Rather, her book decries the administration’s failure to respond to these popular uprisings. On the very last pages, a voice reported in italics, which could belong either to the heroine/narrator or to the author herself, concludes that the nightmare erupted because of a lack of dialogue rather than a lack of speech: “Parce qu’on a oublié de l’écouter, mon peuple a frappé, trop fort” (Because one forgot to listen to them, my people struck, too hard) (Peu 2003a, 148).

The leitmotif of silence permeating the book is not reducible to symbolizing failure. As American political theorist Kennan Ferguson posited, silence is “not only a site of repression but also a nexus of resistance or even a potentiality for creation” (2012, 65). Some of the silent characters in Mutismes: E ‘Ore te Vāvā may perform a different form of communication. The narrator’s mother, for example, uses silence as a powerful means of expression. The narrator recalls, when evoking her mother’s retelling of her ordeal at the hands of her abusive husband, that “il était si beau d’entendre ses silences, lorsque ça devenait trop pénible [à raconter]” (it was so beautiful to hear her silences, when it was becoming too hard [to retell]) (Peu 2003a, 35). Silence here endows her with nobility—and dignity—which words cannot achieve. Later on, when the mother is introduced to her daughter’s lover, she confronts them with mutism: “Nous n’avons eu droit qu’à des silences, pas même des regards furieux” (We were only met with silence, not even angry looks) (Peu 2003a, 67). Here, silence is a weapon that her mother turns against her interlocutors. In both cases, silence cannot be reduced to “colonial mutism.”

Titaua Porcher-Wiart is one of the only literary critics to analyze the muteness leitmotif in francophone Pacific literature as a literary symbol of imperial power dynamics rather than as a characteristic of Pacific societies. She claimed that “the question of muteness that looms in many works of modern anglophone and francophone Pacific literature . . . is portrayed as a physical trace left by colonization in the body of Islanders” (2015, 416; emphasis added). Indeed, the tendency to describe Pacific people as a “soundless people” (peuple insonore) (Spitz 2006, 130) suggests not so much that the colonized cannot speak but rather that the colonizers will not listen.

The novel’s narrative is rife with enthralling storytellers, including the narrator herself, as she eventually reveals that the story readers hold in their hands is an autobiography that she wrote while exiled in Paris. The narrator’s successful quest for words, presenting her autobiography as an ongoing process (“j’écris encore” [I am still writing]) (Peu 2003a, 112), can be read as a prophetic victory. As Peu’s book was published two years before the 2004 election of a Tahitian pro-independence and antinuclear party, it stands out as a victorious attempt to “dire l’ignoble” (narrate that which is revolting) (Peu 2003a, 138). It is a novel about silence, but it is also a novel about ongoing empowerment despite failures. Literary critics have tended to focus on the French part of Peu’s title, neglecting the second, Tahitian part.³

To misread this novel solely as a book about silence is to betray an imperialist bias. When Western poets write about their struggle to find inspiration, they are not reduced to being spokespeople for their respective countries’ muteness. When they write about their difficulty writing, this is not seen as the consequence of their culture. A classic example is French Renaissance poet Joachim du Bellay’s famous collection of sonnets in Les Regrets (1955). In “Las, où est maintenant ce mépris de Fortune,” the poet bemoans his lack of inspiration, lamenting that “et les muses de moi, comme étranges, s’enfuient” (the muses, like strangers, have fled) (du Bellay 1942), but this canonical poem on silence has been lauded for centuries as a testimony to French poetry’s flourishing after a long period of being eclipsed by Latin verses. By contrast, when racialized writers like Peu allude to difficulty finding words, it is frequently reduced to a cultural shortcoming. The fact that Peu’s novel is interpreted as a symbol of Tahitians’ difficulty expressing themselves thus betrays a larger problematic misreading of a masterpiece of Pacific literature.

Conclusion: When the Subaltern Speaks

This article mobilizes the tools and methodologies developed in the field of environmental humanities to reread a masterpiece of Tahitian literature from a different perspective. Analyzing nuclear metaphors, the green nonprofit industrial complex, and the coconstitution of silence and environmental resistance sheds new lights on the scope of Peu’s novel. It corroborates the idea that discussions in environmental humanities have something profound to add to the field of Pacific literature studies—and vice versa. Situating Mā‘ohi contemporary literature in dialogue with the main questions surrounding the Anthropocene thus ensures that antinuclear Pacific fiction will become canonical references in Oceania and beyond.

Literature has long been a favored medium for antinuclear activists to challenge the ongoing mutism surrounding the effects of nuclear testing in French Polynesia. The initial lack of political antinuclear opposition to the Pacific Experimentation Center was obviously due to the massive misinformation campaign launched by the French state, even before the implantation of the center. France has long told Polynesians that the tests presented absolutely no risks to health. Only in 2006, ten years after the last bomb, did France recognize that all of French Polynesia had been affected by more nuclear fallout than it had initially recognized (unga 2018). And it was not until 2016 that France began to compensate victims of radiation-induced diseases who lived outside of the very circumscribed official “risk zones.”

Despite this state-sponsored misinformation, a few antinuclear leaders still managed to vocally oppose nuclear testing: as early as 1950, Pouvanaa a Oopa began collecting signatures in the Tuamotu archipelago as part of global efforts for the Stockholm peace appeal (Maclellan 2019, 4); in the 1960s, deputies Francis Stanford and John Teariki publicly opposed the Pacific Experimentation Center at the Tahitian assembly (Barrillot 2003, 119); and in the 1970s, poet and filmmaker Henri Hiro organized the first antinuclear marches in the country (Pambrun 2010). Yet none of these pioneering men succeeded in centralizing an effective antinuclear movement. Pouvanaa was exiled before the beginning of the tests,⁴ Teariki and Stanford’s government soon became too financially dependent on the Pacific Experimentation Center’s money to oppose it successfully (Haupert 1998, 141), and Hiro long remained politically and socially marginalized before his premature death by cancer. As anthropologist Bruno Saura summarized it, “in antinuclear struggle, Pouvanaa a Oopa was an absent or ‘impeded’ hero, and Henri Hiro, a solitary and misunderstood hero” (Saura 2015, 309). Without either a prominent leader or a large grassroots movement, antinuclear struggle in French Polynesia long lacked a clear voice. It left the victims of nuclear colonialism with not only innumerable health issues but also shame, guilt, and mutism surrounding this nuclear history.

In this context, Pacific antinuclear literature has played a crucial role in challenging this mutism. Peu’s debut novel has politicized this silence. She has transformed it, endowing it with a powerful decolonial meaning. According to postcolonial scholar Kaiama Glover, silence can be both “a refusal to be spoken for” and “a refusal to speak,” and Spivak’s famous interrogation, about whether or not the subaltern can speak, should be complemented by asking “whether or not she wants to speak and, if so, to whom” (Glover 2015, 82). In a context where the green nonprofit industrial complex can co-opt narratives of suffering and rob them of their anticolonial dimension, refusing to speak directly about the mental and physical suffering brought by nuclear colonialism can constitute a powerful combative strategy.